Productivity Sauce

Services like Pocket and Framabag offer a convenient way of saving articles, but a Fetch provides a different way of saving stories for later perusal. Send a link to a special email address, and the application duly sends you a distilled text from the provided page. To use the hosted version of the application, email the link you want to your own address with CC to fetch@to.andyjiang.com. Naturally, you can use Fetch not only to save articles for personal use, but also send them to other recipients. Obviously, Fetch won't replace a dedicated readt-it-later service, but it can come in handy when you need to save or share an article for reading later with a minimum of fuss. The...

Until recently, if you wanted to enjoy an ad-free browsing experience on Android, you basically had two choices: 1) root your device and install the AdAway app, or 2) use alternative browsers like Firefox or Tint equipped with appropriate ad blocking add-ons. Now, you have a third option: the makers of the popular AdBlock Plus extension has released a namesake app for Android. The AdBlock Plus app is not available through the Google Play Store, so you need to install it from the project's website. Once deployed, the app automatically picks the best filtering list, but before it can perform its ad blocking magic, you need to configure the proxy settings manually. Fortunately, this is...

If you try to open a PDF link in Chromium, you'll quickly discover that the browser downloads the source file instead of opening it in a built-in PDF viewer. This happens because Chromium lacks the closed-source PDF module found in Google Chrome. Fortunately, there is a simple fix to this problem. The PDF Viewer extension adds a PDF.js viewer to Chromium which allows you to view PDF files without leaving the convenience of your favorite browser. The extension is based on the PDF.js open source viewer supported by Mozilla. The viewer provides all basic functionality, including navigation actions, page zoom, text selection, search feature, etc.

Getting a system overview on Android and Chromebook can be a real head-scratcher, unless you use Cog. This open source app displays key system information and resource usage in an easy-to-grasp form. Processor architecture, CPU model and utilization, memory amount and usage, screen resolution, network interfaces -- Gog makes all these data immediately available for your viewing pleasure.
You can even watch CPU utilization in real time. This might not be a very practical functionality, but it undeniably makes the dashboard look more stylish. Cog's source code is available in the project's GitHub repository, and you can install the app from the Google Web...

In many ways, Picturo is similar to many other simple photo publishing web applications. It requires only a web server with PHP and the GD library in order to run, and it's supremely easy to deploy. Grab the latest version of Picturo from the project's website, unpack the downloaded archive, and move the resulting directory to the document root of your server. Make then the cache folder writable by the server, upload photos to the content directory, and you are done. Despite being a lightweight application, Picturo does offer several handy features. For starters, it can handle folders, so you can organize your photos into albums. The application also sports a slick interface which lets...

Both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome (along with Chromium) are capable of keeping your bookmarks in sync across multiple platforms and devices. And there are plenty of third-party bookmarking services, too. But if you don't want to store your bookmarks up in the cloud or rely on Firefox's and Chrome's bookmarking capabilities, then you might want to take a look at a clever single-file solution devised by Steve Kemp. This HTML file spiced with a dash of jQuery can be used to maintain bookmarks as a searchable list. All bookmarks in the file are stored as items in a regular HTML list. For each bookmark, you can specify tags, which makes it easier to manage and search the bookmark...

DynDNS's recent decision to cancel its free plan sent many users scrambling to find alternatives to this popular dynamic DNS service. Fortunately, there are plenty of options to choose from, including the newly-launched dhcp.io service. Being free is only one of dhcp.io's many attractions. The service lets you control up to five hostnames, and you don't even need to provide your email address. The best part, however, is the fact that dhcpi.io relies on the good old curl tool to update IP addresses. When you add a hostname, the service conveniently generates a command that updates the value of the hostname. So all you need to do is to install curl (it's available in the software...